No doubt the Universe is unfolding as it should.

Or, how a series of small inconveniences proved to be blessings in disguise.

Much of my celebration of “heart day” yesterday was spent in gratefulness that Morris’s heart is still working.

Just over two weeks ago, Morris started to seem “off” to me. I’m sure I must have been annoying for the number of times I asked if he was okay, checked his temperature, and swabbed his nostrils. (That last one was twice, and of course he was negative.)

He had a funny little cough, and slight trouble breathing. “Are you sure it’s not your heart?” I asked (more than once). He was convinced that it was not.

Reader, he was so, so wrong.

On Friday, I finally pushed him off to see the doctor. I assumed that perhaps he had developed some reactive airway and needed prednisone and/or an inhaler, or that he might have walking pneumonia.

His internist is in Philly. When Morris called in the morning, the scheduling person was extremely difficult and insisted that he needed a negative PCR test to come in if he had a cough, so he went to urgent care that is far more local to us.

He called me from urgent care to put the Nurse Practitioner on the line. She told me I needed to come pick him up and take him to the ER.

He had new onset atrial fibrillation (A-fib).

I took him to the ER, where we watched his heart bounce around unsteadily at alarming rates. The nicest ER doctor got that calmed a bit with some medication, and admitted him.

The admissions guy who came to the ER to admit him told me I was in luck: just that morning, they started allowing visitors again. Prior to Friday, no visitors at all were permitted except in special cases (which didn’t describe our circumstance).

Meanwhile, our dear friends Gene & Donna drove to the hospital to get Morris’s car keys from me, picked up Morris’s car at the urgent care, deposited it in our driveway, and brought the keys back.

Because he was at a Jefferson hospital, the cardiologist on call had access to his full records, since his guy is also a Jeff doc. It turns out that the slight shortness of breath and the weird little cough were related to the A-fib.

I’d heard of atrial fibrillation before and knew it meant an unregulated heartbeat. What I didn’t know was that it meant that the top of the heart just wiggled and stopped pumping properly, which meant blood could pool there and possibly start to form clots.

With A-fib, any clot that formed could end up elsewhere in the body, leading to things like an amputated toe (so said the doc) or a stroke. (I am sharing in hopes this helps someone else.)

Over the weekend, Morris did manage to speak to his own cardiologist as well. Who called Morris as he stepped off an airplane, out of town, on vacation. We love that guy so much.

All of this made for an exciting (in a bad way) weekend. It was distressing and exhausting and stressful.

But.

Because we listened to my intuition, he went to the urgent care. (Left to his own devices, that might not have happened.)

Nothing extremely bad happened during the almost two weeks that he was having symptoms we didn’t recognize as heart-related.

His inability to get to his preferred doctor was probably a blessing in disguise, since he stayed closer to home instead of being sent to an ER and getting admitted in Philadelphia. In any case, both his cardiologist and his internist are away on vacation.

The medical care he got was excellent. The staff was wonderful. Visiting hours had literally just re-started on Friday, so I could spend most of Saturday with him, as well as Sunday morning until discharge.

All of this is pretty excellent evidence that the Universe is working in our favor. But also:

For two weeks prior to the weekend, I tried to plan a trip for us. One where we’d be leaving in early April, which is about six weeks from now. (My birthday is at the start of April, so it was a birthday month thing, as well as a “we need a change of scenery” thing.)

The first few times I tried to sort things out, I kept getting frustrated and stopping.

Eventually, last Wednesday, I found the right flights and hotel and was all set to pull the trigger and book a trip for us. Only Morris had a scheduling issue for one of the days we’d be gone, and needed to clear it.

On Thursday, he said he’d figured it out, but Thursday was my infusion day, and I didn’t have the energy to deal with it.

On Friday, he ended up in the hospital. And part of the possible treatment plan is to do a procedure in about six weeks to try to put his heart back into normal sinus rhythm. Which is obviously a far better birthday gift to me than any trip.

We can hold off on that planned trip until we know what’s going on with his heart.

So, as the Desiderata by Max Ehrmann says, “no doubt the Universe is unfolding as it should.” I’ve always loved that poem, by the way, and remember it being set to music in the 1970s. Here you go:

Original recording of The Desiderata by Les Crane.

Some lessons from this event.

Trust your intuition.

Remember that sometimes things are working in your favor, even when they seem frustrating at the time.